FIRE is a Hedonic Treadmill

I am going to say something that is antithetical to the FIRE movement. And that is, at some point, FIRE can stealthily turn into a hedonic treadmill.

Wait! Come back! Just stay with me before throwing your device across the room in outrage.

I promise I’m going to make this make sense.

OK?

OK…so let’s talk about the hedonic treadmill.

The hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation, happens when a human, exposed to some good-feeling event (the hedonic part) ultimately returns to their baseline feelings. In order to feel good again, they will search out another good feeling experience. This happens over and over again in a cyclical pattern (the treadmill part).

We live at a certain baseline level of feeling, and even when we experience something new and exciting, after a short while, we return to our baseline. It’s adaptive, really.

Now, how does this relate to FIRE?

The concepts of FIRE are often positioned as a way to “step off” the hedonic treadmill. The idea is to recognize when we are caught up in consumer culture as a result of an ever-escalating need to feel the excitement of another purchase.

The FIRE community is often joked about as a cult, especially around the idea of the consumer-driven hedonic treadmill. When a person discovers that they don’t need to spend everything they earn, but instead can save and invest money to amass real wealth, sometimes a conversion happens. I’m talking old-time-religion-road-to-Damascus style conversion. And with that conversion comes wholesale changes. Lifestyle, job, and mode of transportation to name a few.

Once people invest in the idea of reaching financial independence, they look at their choices and make changes. They might realize that they’ve been on a hedonic treadmill of consumption. They might notice that every new purchase comes only with a temporary bump in happiness. They’ve been upping the ante for years, trying to keep the treadmill going. So, they start to slash needless spending, pay down debt, and make monetary investments in their future. They start to step off of the treadmill.

There is a spark of joy with each new thing. When someone looks at their growing Vanguard account, they become giddy. But after a while, big changes become the new normal. A person might start to see if there is anything else in their life that is unoptimized. And with each new lifestyle or financial tweak, another warm and fuzzy feeling that rises up and just as quickly goes away. Sounds a little cyclical, no?

Since I am a part of this strange and beautiful group of weirdos, I can testify to the hedonic treadmill-like affects FIRE optimization can have. I can also attest to the dearth of joy in such a life. It turns out there is only so much tweaking and optimizing one can do.

A lot of people refer to this stage as the “middle” of their journey to financial independence. People commiserate over the slow and arduous feeling of this stage. But I just think that is the feeling of baseline. The baseline you created after the big change. Which, ironically, means you have a lower self-imposed budget to engage in other forms of hedonic adaptation.

Since I am constantly researching ways to cultivate happiness in my own life, I look to people who study conundrums like these. Arthur C. Brooks is one of my favorites. He calls the above phenomenon the “striver’s curse” wherein goal- oriented achievers will display patterns reminiscent of addiction.

It can be so easy to get caught up in the achievement of FIRE. Each achievement gives you the same feeling that consumption might have given you in the past. You get a “bump” in feel-good hormones with every optimization, every monetized side hustle, every maxed retirement account.

So, what are we supposed to do to keep our lives from looking like an OK GO video?

Let’s start with the actual word Hedonic- which comes from the word hedonia. Hedonia means pleasure. Hedonic happiness, therefore, means happiness we get from pleasure. It turns out we can get pleasure from both overspending and overachieving, because they hit the same button in our crazy monkey brains. Think dopamine/reward. Like sugar. Or heroin.

But…there is another type of happiness. Eudaimonic happiness.

Eudaimonic happiness is achieved through experiences of meaning and purpose, which engage some prosocial areas of the brain.

In Functional MRI studies of the brain, there are differences as well. To the best of my abilities (I’m only a dentist after all) let me try to simplify some of the things I’ve read. While both types of happiness stimulate some of the same areas of the brain, there were some key differences.

Hedonic happiness is focused on the self and on the past, namely the personal pleasure one has experienced doing something before.

Eudaimonic happiness is focused external to the self and on the future, integrating the environment and meaning.

So hedonic is focused on pleasure and eudaimonic on meaning. Hedonic is focused on getting back to doing a thing for yourself that felt good in the past. Eudaimonic is focused on how good you will feel with people you like doing things that are important to you.

To be fair, we need both of these types of happiness.

If we didn’t feel a whole lot better after eating lunch when hungry (hedonic), we wouldn’t be motivated to do it. And that would have a bad outcome. If we keep eating beyond what we need in order to keep the hedonic feeling going, that would also have a bad outcome.

Maybe, sitting there eating our sandwich, we wave a colleague over to sit down with us. We talk about the volunteer work we plan to do this weekend. It feels pleasant. That would be the eudaimonic.

Getting off the treadmill is about knowing where you are in the balance between the different types of happiness. FIRE can reset your baseline and feel amazing…for a while. But after that, it’s all going to go back to normal until your next optimization.

Be prepared to combat the FIRE/Achievement hedonic treadmill with some eudaimonic substitutes instead. Make some friends. Volunteer. Cultivate self-awareness. Get outside of yourself. Truly step off of the treadmill.

I’ll leave you with this TED Talk if you want to learn more about happiness as well as the hedonic treadmill.